Ensuring ‘Boersk Blek Metle’ miscreants Lugubrum remain unknown is becoming some secretive, misanthropic task not unlike guarding the Holy Grail from the evil attention of esoteric Nazis – it must remain within the temple! Don’t cross the seal! Faced with a choice of paths, one cannot pretend there is not. Listening yet again to Heilige Dwazen, an album that takes the band’s creative Jazzy musicianship and creates a nightmarish Black Metal world from it, I remember why I keep this band in that special, seasonal box that ensures I do not even approach oversaturation, that keeps them fresh and new and a challenge. Choosing a path through this particular forest is madness, yet you cannot choose, you must follow. The opening is more Klezmer than Krieg, yet given time the band expand into the kind of progressive atmospheric meander that makes them one of the best Black Metal acts in town, chaotic ricocheting that is as disturbing as it is delightful, the gasps and psychedelic wails of Holy Fools Embodied (lyrics throughout are a special form of bonkers) immediate and nerve-wracking. Is there even a path, or is it all some strange dream? The Kiss On The Anus introduces groove to the album and sets the pair up with a deranged chessboard for the sort of cataclysmic match that is not designed for human minds to fathom. As the lyrics state, ‘like the masturbating fish, I abandoned all hope’.

Clawing back, I’m always amazed by the rather disturbing world that Lugubrum effortlessly conjure on their albums, one that is impossible not to enter. A psychotic dreamworld. At The Base Of Their Tail, for instance, puts Carpathian Forest’s perverse attempts at music to shame as it suggests filth and depravity almost without trying, snarls and shrieks colliding with musicianship and bursts of saxophone like the dual halves of an insane mind trying to repair itself. Of course, to truly understand madness one has to experience it, which is probably why this review is making little sense to you, dear reader. Yet if the actual shuffling chains and snuffling creatures that open Though Chained don’t disturb, the deep tones and misanthropic shrieks that follow will provide a more headbangable approach to the centre of the woods, like following a saxophonist on his journey to dementia. This is one of those albums that rewards closed eyes and utter concentration like no other, as it becomes genuinely hard to believe that sane people could have created this.

It’s not at all catchy, catching. Haha! No, sneaky, as We Slyly Sucked Stolen Bread and laughed to ourselves as surrounded by some strange opera, miserable in our madness yet happy in our hysteria. Thirteen minute closer On Anemone Meteorites sums the album up as a whole, the most Black Metal track on show, yet as it closes on a repeated, utterly demented fairground refrain that burrows its way into your skull and takes up residence like some uncanny David Lynch creation. This album leaves you weeping tears of frustration, utterly confused, yet unable and unwilling to return to the world before. An experiment, a step sideways into madness, an experience utterly beyond the monkey on the cover art, Lugubrum proved here that they are an insidious being indeed, a creative well that bleeds brown blood, a step towards Lovecraftian madness without the beasts. Here, the madness lays before you, and as impossible to understand as if it were birthed centuries away, atmospherically insane and musically deranged – the sort of band you really, really wish didn’t exist, but you are reminded of in vast, cosmic dreams, the music of the stars if the stars were mad. It will only make sense if you are blind drunk, yet afterwards you will recall nothing... this album speaks in images, and draws pictures for the unseeing, like all of the band’s works. Come, dip into Lugubrum’s brown world, take a walk into the woods that your mind will not recover quickly from.